Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

(WARNING: I'm planning on telling pretty much the whole plot in this review. If you have any urge to spend three bucks of your hard-earned money on this video, I'd suggest reading another review first.)

It's a funny thing about comedies: you generally expect them to be funny. In fact, I'd venture so far as to say they should be funny, or at least marginally amusing, in order to earn the "comedy" categorization.

This, I'm afraid, is something that the writers for Life in the Fast Lane seem to have forgotten. The movie is one ploddingly ridiculous situation after another, many scenes that easily could have ended up on a cutting room floor somewhere in north Jersey and saved us all a few minutes of our already-overburdened lives, in fact. It's incoherently written, shoddily edited, and badly directed. To call it a comedy is to sadly underestimate the collective viewing audience.

The Devil and Fairuza Balk:
The film begins by introducing Balk's character (one so forgettable that I've forgotten her name, in fact.): a painter in some unidentified big city that looks a lot like L.A., and her simpering boyfriend who is a street artist/graffiti artist. Unsatisfied with her relationship, she has an encounter with a mysterious stranger (Dempsey) in front of a local church. It seems that one-time meeting is more than enough for the fickle girl, as she rapidly begins to lose faith in her current relationship and breaks it off with her long-time boyfriend to pursue/stalk the nameless man.

This wouldn't necessarily make for a horrid film...if it wasn't for the fact that a) Dempsey's stranger never utters so much as a single word to her, and b) the writers didn't then want to insert another small plot twist. Namely, that Dempsey isn't just a random stranger, he's the Devil.

Yes, the Devil himself. With a camera. And the same bad 1980's hair that Dempsey had in "Can't Buy Me Love". Ugh.

As if that's not enough, Balk's association with the "nameless stranger" (in the credits, he's just referred to as "the stranger", go figure...) leads her to inadvertently kill her boyfriend when he mails himself to her inside a moving box. Of course, the stranger disappears when the girls (Balk and her hystrionic, jaded, and very pregnant cousin who has come to stay with her) have their reaction scene to the boyfriend in a box with a pair of scissors sticking straight out of his skull.

Had this been it, I might have gone for two stars on this one. The cousin was mildly amusing and the silent stranger shtick hadn't gone too far. But there's more.

Jeff's (the boyfriend) ghost proceeds to follow Balk around for the next hour of the movie, simpering and whining that she killed him and that his body needs a proper burial. The body is carjacked, left in the back of a stolen pickup, and generally undiscovered while Balk whines and mopes and acts sufficiently ArtGoth for the rest of the movie until she finds the body and decides to die.

At this point, you hardly care, as long as the movie's over.

Nitpicking:
First of all, and most importantly, this movie is just not funny. I get more laughs out of stubbing my toe on a random chair leg than I did out of Life in the Fast Lane. In fact, I probably get less pain from it. And it hurts for a lot less time. I kept watching with that kind of morbid car-wreck fascination, hoping they'd suddenly be funny, or at least impart some kind of cosmic wisdom about the nature of good and evil, but there wasn't any of that. The whole thing felt like a wind-up to a joke that the audience just wasn't privy to.

Worse, the acting was awful. Why Dempsey decided to act the part of the Devil while never once uttering a word is beyond me. (Though I'm sure any work at all now that the aging geek is past the fumbling teenager roles is a godsend.) Balk is supposed to have a vulnerability, I think -- but she's got this shocked disaffection going on that seems like she just doesn't really care what's happening, or that her boyfriend is in a box with a cork in his head (don't ask). The one thing she plays well is a sort of cruel depression and gothic disconnection -- and that she's got in droves, whether or not it was called for in this role.

Even though I know this was an indie film (no self-respecting Hollywood producer would have acked this thing, I'm sure, which isn't always a bad thing....but it is in this case.), the production quality often made me wonder if I was watching someone's home videos. Grainy (and not in an on-purpose kind of way), jumpy, badly framed -- it was like a cautionary tale in Film 101.

SUMMARY:
Avoid this. At all costs. If it's playing at a friend's house, fake the flu and run away. It's that bad.

A small, humerous note:
There is one tiny thing that did make me kind of giggle once. There's a recurring image of a particularly ugly dog -- small, ratlike, and mangy -- that shows occasionally through the film for no apparent reason. It's at her friend's shop, played by Tia Leone, who was actually kind of funny in a bungling sort of way.

If you -have- to see this film, it may be the one bright spot in your two hours of Hell, no pun intended.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older